Saturday, January 09, 2010

Making order and clearung up clutter can be very satisfying. This is what I'm currently taking care of. Half of this collection actually came from my father's house, and I have tested all of them, bravely throwing away things that were out of order. I just did not want to carry around with too much useless items. But I admit being sentimental - those wooden pencils that were so carefully sharpened by hand with a sharp swiss pocket knife, by my father himself, are sacred; for the others I enjoy a new toy I always wanted; the semi automatic pencil sharpener...

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Back in 2002, I did my first session with the Electronic Village Online EVO - an open online workshop run by volunteers and webheads and attended by some 2000 teachers worldwide over a period of 6 weeks prior to the annual TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages ) convention. In 2003, I was part of the leadership team for the legendary session known as Becoming a Webhead, with Dafne Gonzalez and Teresa d'Eca who are still running this amazing all-in-one tour de force, with many helpers doing a sort of trainee service, with a broad list of prominent guests sharing their online teaching expereinces, tips and tricks.And there are many others that I can fully recommend. For myself speaking, I gave up being an active part of all this, mainly because January is a busy exam month for me. Still, I will keep an aye on what's going on, and jump in spontaneously whenever I feel I have some spare time.

All of these 6-week online workshops are run by volunteers, completely free of charge and a fine for participants to get hands-on experience in a particular area as well as making valuable connections with educators from around the world. It also serves as a very much needed hands-on mutual training for those who feel ready to take the role as instructor, workshop leader, facilitator or whatever you would like to call it More details about the Electronic Village Online 2010 could be found here:evosessions.pbworks.com

First five days of the year, getting things done one by one. I'm not going to share details about what these needs are, just marking with some satisfaction each time these chores are cleared away from the clutter, and some valuable time invested in my life bank. We do live one day at a time, and still - who knows, what tomorrow will bring?

Decided to go back to blogging, because I realized that I do have one or more readers out there, after all, and also because the blogging as self biographical practice helps me to get an overview of this messy online world view. The Blogspot tool still keep me happy because of its ease of use , however I sometimes would love to have more power over the look and feel; this might be one of my next steps ahead. Or else, catching up with older blogs that are by now abandoned. I used to have a "veteran" homepage with my first blog attepmts back in 2001 (!), all of a sudden the page was taken down by the host last October, with a 20 days warning; my internet provider just does not offer hosting of our homepages any more, with no further explanation. I managed to capture most of the content the day before it was ultimately gone and away, a memo to self about the semi permanence of cyberhosted stuff. It did need some revision anyway, reminded me a bit about old school free style carnets, or the good old family portraits that I've started to scan, for a more up to date storage format.

Writing small blog posts like this one actually does make me feel quite satisfied and happy to share thoughts and ideas.Please add your comments if you have any; for some reason I need to allow only comments from Blogspot members, or else I will get bot spam to clear out, which can be like messy, ugly and depressing. Which I don't want to waste energy on; on the contrary I need some organized overlook, beauty and happiness around my workplace :-)